1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of network-based or supported communications and pertains particularly to methods and a system for managing routing of transactions to agents operating on behalf of a host of a contact center.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In the field of network communications, call centers or contact centers are enterprises or divisions of larger companies that specialize in communication with customers and fulfilling the goals of those customers. A contact center may specialize in certain types of transacting including sales order processing, technical support, loan consultation, sales prospecting, and other transactional business. State-of-art contact centers may employ automated servicing like interactive voice response (IVR), Web-based interfaces for ordering product and registering for service in addition to retaining live personnel to interact with incoming and outbound telephone contacts, emails, Instant messages, chat requests, and so on.
In a state-of-art contact center there is a seamless integration between Internet protocol network telephony (IPNT) and connection-oriented network telephony (COST). Most callers are first screened for purpose, such as an IVR unit before internally routing those events to live agents.
Live agents working in a state-of-art contact center are tightly controlled within the center and may be stationed at local-area-network (LAN)-connected workstations. Desktop applications are provided that work to report the current status of these agents with respect to call load and general availability of those agents for performing certain tasks including answering phones, working email, running or participating in chat sessions, Instant messaging, and so on. Agents generally must be logged into a contact center workflow system or equivalent and may log out only at defined time periods such as the end of a shift, lunch, and break times during the work period. Therefore, statistics relative to contact center resource availability are used to fine tune call flow through the center to comply with a service objective (SO) of the center.
In some state-of-art contact centers, or elsewhere in the enterprise hosting such a center, there are personnel that are highly skilled and/or have skills of special value that typical contact center agents may not posses. These agents may be considered as special agents. These agents may have many different tasks to perform for the enterprise, and many of those tasks may not involve interaction with a customer. However, such special agents at a contact center are often needed to complete certain transactions that a typical live agent is not qualified to complete because of a special skill or knowledge that they posses.
Often calls are transferred to special agents after live agents interact with customers, and the special agent completes the transaction. Special agents for an enterprise may operate anywhere in the enterprise, or externally as remote agents. For example, a contact center may reside in India where the special agents for the enterprise reside in the states and so on. Therefore, it is not feasible to apply the type of tight monitoring applied to regular contact-center agents to special agents as their responsibilities and work schedules may vary widely. However, it is feasible that special agents available to the contact center system are made visible to the system through rich presence information, login to a network-supported system, or perhaps other voluntary means executed by the special agents themselves.
A problem arises when incoming calls, for example, are answered by IVR, queued for live agents, and then transferred to special agents. The routing at this point is blind because the system does not know if the special agent is at his or her extension, or if they are, whether they are available to engage in the transaction or not. Valuable customers may drop out of the system if they are forced to wait for a special agent for an extended amount of time compared to estimated waiting time (EWT) of a typical call in an agent queue. Without assurance that special agents will be available and if so, able to handle transactions transferred to them in a reasonable time, the service level objectives (SLO) of the contact center may suffer depending on the call load transferred.
In other situations, even live agents dedicated to a call center may be expected to handle many tasks other than interacting with customers through routed events like voice calls and emails, for example. Some live agents may be expected to handle emails, chat sessions and the like, and also to do off-line work as well and therefore may not always be available in an instant to handle a live interaction. So it may be said, in general, that the term agent should be considered broadly as any person operating on behalf of the enterprise and enabled to receive routed events and interact with customers.
Therefore, what is clearly needed in the art is a method and system for routing events to agents, the method and system taking into account the fact that some agents may routinely be engaged in tasks that may occupy their attention, or even take them away from their workstations where they are enabled to interact with routed events.